Yah! It's premiere week. :-)
Brent ------------ http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2007/09/geektv Sci-Fi, Freaks and Supergeeks Take Over TV Screens By Mark Anderson 09.24.07 A memo saying "geek chic is going mainstream" must have circulated among network TV execs as they concocted this fall's prime-time lineup. Hoping to woo coveted geek eyeballs, they've put their money on nine new shows focusing on - or catering to - nerds, freaks and outsiders of every type. "Geeks are the new cool," said Teri Weinberg, NBC Entertainment's executive vice president. "We are all gravitating towards the underdog." Geek TV shows like The Big Bang Theory, The Sarah Connor Chronicles and a retooled Bionic Woman make up roughly 20 percent of the major networks' new prime-time programming for the 2007-08 season. They join returning geek favorites that include ABC's Ugly Betty, NBC's Heroes and the SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica, which blasts back with a two-hour made-for-TV movie later in the year and a fourth season beginning in '08. Perhaps the most hotly anticipated, new geek TV show is NBC's Chuck, a phish-out-of-water story about a computer nerd whose brain becomes the unwitting recipient of an encoded e-mail containing the government's darkest secrets. Joseph McGinty Nichol, aka McG, directed the Chuck pilot. He said the trend toward geek, underdog and outsider stories in TV is really just a mirror pointed back at American culture. "There's always a delay between what's really happening in the streets and what you see reflected in the movie theaters on Friday and on network television night-in, night-out," he said. Hollywood, he said, is playing catch-up with IT culture. "The classic shape of the computer geek is over when Bill Gates became the (richest), most aspirational, coolest guy in the world," he said. "He is the original thick-glasses, pocket-protector guy. Now who doesn't want to be like Bill Gates?" The pilots for five of the new geek TV series stand out as programs good enough to keep an eye on. (See our reviews.) One of the nine, a British import, will come out on DVD early next year, and an Americanized adaptation of it (currently unavailable for review) will air on NBC around the same time. What distinguishes the five best shows - ABC's Pushing Daisies, The CW's Reaper, NBC's Chuck, U.K. Channel 4's The IT Crowd and Fox's The Sarah Connor Chronicles - reads like either a cheesy Zen mantra or a fortune cookie bromide: Accept what you are, and know what you're not. Each carves out its own unique, well-conceived geek subspace and keeps within its own self-defined borders, whether it's exquisitely crafted characters in a vivid fantasy world (Daisies), demon-slaying slackers (Reaper), tech-department nerds (The IT Crowd) or fugitives from a Terminator-fouled future (Sarah Connor). The influence of geek guru Judd Apatow extends well into the current season. He was director of box-office-smash outsider comedies The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, producer of the blockbuster Superbad, and creator of the nerd-TV gold-standard series Freaks and Geeks, which ran for two years on NBC before attaining cult status. Many of Apatow's past projects are now being cloned for the small screen. Chain-store working stiff Andy Stitzer (Steve Carrell) of 40-Year-Old Virgin finds two spitting-image counterparts in the roles of Sam Oliver (Bret Harrison in Reaper) and Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi in Chuck). And the Superbad-Freaks and Geeks rendition of high school life from the outsider's point of view serves as an essential plot summary of The CW's new Aliens in America. "I feel like we're living in a Judd Apatow universe," McG said. "It's a wonderful voice to echo." Thom Sherman, executive vice president of drama development at The CW, said that as the world becomes more dependent on technology, those who can better master it gain higher status than yesterday's Revenge of the Nerds herd did. "Technology and the internet are playing a big part of everybody's world," he said. "At its core, people want to see themselves in the lead characters in shows. Whether we call them 'geeks' or 'nerds,' the major quality of these people is they all seem like good, normal, underdog-type characters. You can step into their shoes, and they're just like you and me."
